Alexander Bain invented the fax machine. John Pemberton created Coca-Cola. James Harrison invented the refrigerator. All of them went broke because they didn't know how to run a business. Creating a successful invention isn't enough; this guide shows how to make it a business.

Too often, our failure to succeed as crafts professionals lies not in the absence of talent or skills, but in resistance to acquiring a knowledge of sound business practices—especially those related to law and contracts. Like it or not, artists and artisans are as involved as other professionals in business and business law. Because art is at best a precarious means of life support, we require familiarity with applicable law in order to proceed easily and confidently in business transactions. As artists, we have a perennial tendency to spurn all conventional wisdom, to treat business dealings with the same spirit of adventure with which we develop media or style. Reinventing the wheel of business practice does not work as well as we would like, and being unclear in contractual matters makes us all the more vulnerable in transactions in which we commit our resources and our futures.

Open source resources are completely common within our society. Yet open source and free software remain a mystery. Science, public highways, city parks, language—these are at the core of any free society. Commerce gets built upon them. Culture flourishes through them. Yet the same ideas applied to software puzzle many people. Language can be free, and the results of science open to all, yet to many, software is, or should be, proprietary.

Barfield and Calfee clearly explain arcane issues of patent law and the tremendous effect that they can have on our economy, our technological progress, and our health. As Congress considers sweeping changes to the patent law, this book is a timely evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the current system and the risk of overly aggressive reform. Biotechnology and the Patent System analyzes the role of intellectual property protection in biomedical research, one of America’s leading growth industries. Barfield and Calfee explore ways in which patent law fosters future research and venture capital investment; they also evaluate whether the current system could potentially impede genomic research and the development of new treatment and diagnostic tools.

Intellectual property rights have undergone a significant expansion over the last half century, particularly since the Copyright Act of 1976. In The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Law, William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner (AEI Press; July 1, 2004) attempt to explain this expansion of intellectual property rights, and how it could have coincided with the deregulation movement. Should intellectual property be thought of as a form of regulation? Why did the movement for greater protection of intellectual property coincide with the deregulation movement? Landes and Posner apply public-choice theory to the growth and character of intellectual property protection over the last half-century. The authors argue that public-choice theory alone cannot explain the coincidence of the deregulation movement and the rapid growth of intellectual property protection. Political forces and ideological currents associated with the deregulation movement, combined with interest-group pressures, best explain the increases in intellectual property protection since 1976. The authors urge caution in equating intellectual property rights to physical property rights. They counsel skeptics of government to hesitate before extending a presumption of efficiency to a process by which government grants rights to exclude competition.

In the first attempt to fully explore the controversial issues associated with the commercial application of nanotechnology, you'll find a thorough analysis of intellectual property and patents, financing and legal concerns, regulatory measures particularly in the field of nanomedicine, and environmental regulations. The authors include a set of guideposts you can follow in your due diligence of the business and legal issues pertaining to the technology.

The scope of US antitrust law as defined in the Supreme Court's decisions in Trinko and Credit Suisse Securities is much narrower than the scope of EU competition law. US antitrust enforcers have become increasingly reluctant to apply antitrust rules to regulated markets, whereas the European Commission has consistently used EU competition rules to correct the externalities resulting from government action. The contrasting approaches adopted by US and EU antitrust enforcers to these issues, as with the differences in addressing market dominance, have had a profound impact on the scope of antitrust intervention in the IP field. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the relevant recent developments on both sides of the Atlantic and identifies the pitfalls of regulating IP through competition rules. With a unique comparative perspective, this book will be an invaluable resource for postgraduate students, academics and practitioners in IP and competition law.

In this volume, leading scholars tackle the debate over intellectual property rights in high-technology industries and express their views on how to improve the current system.

This all-inclusive guide tells you everything you need to know about registering a copyright, duration of ownership, what constitutes infringement, electronic publishing rights, protecting rights on the Internet, and more.